Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and did what any one of us would do (and have done!) to shrink responsibility for an embarrassing failure: she blamed Verizon.

“It is the Verizon server that failed, not HealthCare.gov,” she told members of Congress regarding an outage that occurred yesterday evening. On the spectrum of unaccountable scapegoats, “it’s Verizon” ranks an impressive seventh on the list of unverifiable evergreen villains. The full list, as compiled the America’s tardiest, most irresponsible social scientists, is below:

“My wifi was weird.”

“The Apple Store took forever.”

“I had to wait in line at Citibank to do this thing.”

“It’s Verizon.”

“I had to meet my super.”

“My phone died.”

“My phone died and my alarm never rang.”

“My computer just, like, turned off.”

“Time Warner . . . ” [trails off]

“The subway was a mess.”

The problem with Sebelius’s strategy is that when you testify to, say, the VF.com editor that “Verizon was being glitchy” and that is the reason your Kathleen Sebelius post took forever, Verizon does not get wind of this and leap to publicly defend itself. However, when you testify to Congress that Verizon was being glitchy, Verizon will blow up your alibi. “Verizon offered a different version of events Tuesday night,” Politico reports, as Sebelius slumped in her seat, took out her iPhone, and did a Twitter search for “Amtrak late” to see whether any plausible backup excuses could be identified.